Oracle to make cloud deals with Netsuite, Microsoft and Salesforce

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claims that the company is set to make a “startling” partnership announcement with major cloud service providers including Netsuite, Microsoft and Salesforce, next week.

Oracle plans to make the announcement next week

Ellison made the claim during a quarterly earnings call with analysts on Thursday.

“Next week, we will be announcing technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS companies and infrastructure companies in the cloud, and they will be using our technology,” Ellison said. He suggested that vendors like Netsuite, Microsoft and Salesforce will be “committing to our technology for years to come.”

The company also used the opportunity to highlight Oracle’s shift to the cloud. Oracle’s HCM Cloud, CRM Cloud and ERP Cloud grew 50 per cent and the company added over 500 new SaaS customers in Q4 alone, according to president Mark Hurd.

“Our annualized SaaS revenue run rate is over $1bn, making us a strong number two in cloud applications – we are larger than SAP and Workday combined. Furthermore, in Q4 our HCM cloud alone generated more SaaS revenue and added more new Fusion HCM customers than Workday added HCM and ERP customers combined in their most recent quarter,” Hurd said.

Ellison’s explicit mention of Salesforce was interesting because in October last year, the company announced that it was working on a “big project” based on PostgreSQL, an open source database competing with technology on offer from Oracle. Nevertheless it’s likely that Oracle’s impending announcement will include that company’s 12c database. While few details were offered about the announcement, Ellison was quick to relate SaaS vendor commitment to 12c, saying that this would serve as the “foundation of a modern cloud.” 12c allows multiple databases to run in a single container, which means big multi-tenancy capability potential. The company has been touting the technology for over a year, though it has not yet been officially released.

Jonathan BrandonJonathan Brandon is editor of Business Cloud News where he covers anything and everything cloud. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathanbrandon.